Languages and Peanut Butter Crunch

I used to joke about mixing up languages but I'm having a pretty strong and pretty real attack of it right now. Last night I had dinner with In and Justyna, speaking German the whole time. I came home and had to write a few emails in Spanish. I'm pretty sure they all ended up in the target language, I don't even think I actually /typed/ any words in German, but as I was writing, thinking ahead a few words (because that's what it takes, more actively and more noticeably, with a second language) I realized that my mind kept jumping ahead, thinking of the German words, and then crossing them out and finding the Spanish equivalents. It wasn't a big deal as my German and Spanish are about on the same level (Spanish probably better), so I didn't get stuck in the trap of 'oh dear, I don't know how to say _____ after planning this paragraph around it'. Still, it was weird. Spanish and German usually have a very firm wall between them in my mind. I'm not used to mixing them up like with German-Norwegian, for example. But I had some pretty legit Deutschspañol going on in the Hintergrund of my mind. And huh, you know, I really did not mean to write Hintergrund, just then. It just suddenly seems so natural in English. Yes, I can think of Background in .001 seconds flat, but Hintergrund suddenly doesn't seem to stick out very much anymore. I'm not convinced we don't use it at least in certain, obscure applications in English, as a loan word. Maybe Freudian psychology or something.

Had my Norwegian exam and I feel pretty good about it. I know I did terrible on several sections of grammar, particularly writing dates out (which I might have gotten a decent score on if he's big on partial credit, if he strikes out the whole line for a small mistake, I bombed it for sure) and comparatives/superlatives (ironic because this was one of the first things I learned in Norwegian, at least in the most basic sense). I must not have been there when they talked about these, maybe that was last semester? But still the trouble only amounted to 1/4-1/3 of the grammar section, which was only 1/4 of the whole exam. I owned listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and the free-writing section.

Then I headed to the organic bio supermarket that I finally discovered at the bus station. Yes, it's overpriced, but sometimes its worth it. Like when I suddenly have a craving for milk, and going there over the normal store saves me 20 minutes of transport time, only costs about 30 cents more, and as a bonus I get my milk non-ultra-high-temperature-pasteurized, but all American like, and beautifully refrigerated. I might even care a little more about organic milk than organic other products, what with all the funky feminine hormones floating around. Worth 30 cents, anyway. This one time. I came home and I ate half the liter of milk over peanut butter crunch, brought from home back in February, that's still tolerably fresh. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and say that the overdose of preservatives in that puppy have fully negated any feel-good live-good benefits I got from my organic milk. But I needed the grounding, the little taste of home, to gather the strength for the last push through finals...